The start of the season on the Sussex
Coast eighty years ago in April 1925 with the paddle steamer Brighton Belle
taking advantage of Wednesday early closing day in Hastings to offer
coastal cruises to Dungeness, Eastbourne and Brighton.

Brighton Belle was built in 1900 as the
Lady Evelyn for the Furness Railway Company's service between Barrow and Fleetwood.
After the First World War she was bought by Tuckers for their Yellow Funnel service on the Bristol
Channel but this lasted lasted only until 1923 when the company went into
liquidation. Campbells then snapped her up at a bargain price,
renamed her Brighton Belle, registered her in Newhaven and put her into
service on their
Sussex Coast routes.

Brighton Belle was quite a
small and slow steamer by P & A Campbell standards and, as a result, generally
left the longer sailings to bigger and faster paddlers spending most of her time
pottering about between the piers at Brighton, Eastbourne and Hastings and
offering other short cruises such as towards Seaford Bay, round the Royal
Sovereign Lightship, towards Dungeness or towards the Newhaven Breakwater. This
omnipresence on shorter cruises had one unexpected result which has secured her
a place in the memory of very many people not otherwise even remotely interested
in the history of excursion paddle steamers. In Graham Greene's novel
Brighton Rock, a tale of Catholicism and gangsters in 1930s Brighton, the
amateur detective Ida receives an invitation from her friend Mr Corkery "It's a
fine day, Ida. Let's go on the Brighton Belle and talk it over there. No
closing hours at sea."

According to P & A Campbells's guide
book for the period, Brighton Belle did have a Class II Passenger
Certificate for cross Channel work with a passenger capacity reduced from 779 to
just 320 and she was fitted with the necessary radio telephone but she seems not
to have used this very much. Chris Collard recounts in his excellent book
Special Excursions, The Story of Campbell's steamers 1919 - 1939, that she
made only one such trip to Boulogne arriving and departing the port on Sunday
28th August 1932.

1936 was Brighton Belle's last
season on the Sussex Coast during which she had the distinction of being struck
by lightening. A newspaper report stated "At 8.43am on July 10, in a violent
thunderstorm, Brighton Belle was bringing 50 people from Hastings to join
the Brighton Queen for Boulogne, and when she was 300yds from Eastbourne
Pier there was a blinding flash, accompanied by deafening thunder, splintering
the top of the top of the foremast with the aerial spreader sent whipping down
to the deck narrowly missing the captain on the bridge. The radio was burned out
and the purser, Mr Cuttle, received severe shock."

From 1937 to 1939 she was transferred to
operate on the Bristol Channel.

Brighton Belle was one of
many steamers called up to assist in the evacuation of Dunkirk in May 1940 but,
sadly, she had the misfortune to strike a wreck off the French Coast on the 28th
May. Shortly afterwards she sank as reported above in the Daily Mirror of 5th
June 1940 and disappeared beneath the waves like some of the ill-starred
gangsters in Graham Green's Brighton Rock. Shelives on thoughin the minds of readers for generations to come with her minor but
nonetheless important place in English literature.